Electronic Financial and Acquisition Services Tool

The Procurement Problem
		Dr. Jones, a program manager, has issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) to solicit research ideas on his Widgets program. The solicitation is published in the Commerce Business Daily (CBD), and immediately Dr. Jones and his staff receive an overwhelming number of requests for the Proposer Information Pamphlet (PIP). Dr. Jones and his team get the impression that there will be a large number of abstracts and proposals submitted in response to this BAA. Dr. Jones knows that his staff is very organized, efficient, and quite skilled with the MS Office suite, but they have not gone through this process before, and so they're not sure how to best tackle the logistics and processing of this solicitation. Dr. Jones has many briefings and programmatic activities occurring simultaneously that he would like his staff to focus on, and it would be ideal if they didn't have to take an inordinate amount of time away to focus on the BAA. Also, Dr. Jones knows that the BAA is subject to rules in the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), and as such, the process requires close scrutiny. What will Dr. Jones and his staff do?

The Procurement Solution
		Solution: SPC comes to the rescue with the eFAST suite and the outstanding specialized support that accompanies the system. Because of our close understanding of the process, our proven track record in supporting a high number of government solicitations, and the eFAST suite, Dr. Jones chooses to utilize our support after a capability briefing. Because Dr. Jones feels that teaming is a vital process for the Widgets community, SPC develops and publishes a teaming website to invite potential contractors to team with one another. Once the proposals are received, SPC creates a Source-Selection Sensitive CD for the Evaluation Board which contains the PIP, the eFAST software for either the PC or Mac platform, an Adobe PDF file containing electronic versions of all of the Abstracts/Proposals and a Read-Me file which contains complete instructions on how to use the system. The Read-Me file also contains a hyperlink to an Upload Evaluation website developed by SPC, which will receive the evaluation files once an individual reviewer has completed his/her evaluations of the subject proposals. "What once was a week-plus process has been reduced down to in many cases a half-day meeting." Now that the data entry is complete and the individual evaluations have been done, the information is compiled and presented to the Program Manager who then prepares for the Consensus meeting. Use of the eFAST evaluation module is critical on the day of the meeting, as what once was a week-plus process has been reduced down to in many cases a half-day meeting. The system enables the board to come to consensus quickly, with features such as: sorting proposals by scores, ratings, technical areas, standard deviation, number of reviewers, etc. eFAST enables the board to focus in on the areas where in-depth discussion is necessary, and once complete, the system has numerous required reports immediately available to the Program Manager. These reports enable him/her to quickly assess the selectable/non-selectable proposals, comply with Agency/Office requirements, comply with Contracting Officer requirements, debrief proposers, and begin financial planning to award a subset of the selectable proposals. In this scenario, eFAST has reduced the time, cost, and headaches that accompany a solicitation, and the Program Manager remained in control and not bogged down by the process.